To increase the throughput of service, a typical technique includes scaling server instances according to the volume of requests from clients, especially in the cloud computing environment. A cluster of many server instances may be arranged to service various types of client requests. Often, a gateway device will distribute or scatter incoming service requests to individual server instances in the cluster, which service the requests in a more-or-less parallel fashion. For example, many or all of the server instances in the cluster may be capable of servicing various types of requests.
As with most resources, it may be desirable to maintain the server instances periodically. Maintenance updates, new component installations, as well as patches and the like are to be deployed to each of the server instances. Generally, to perform the maintenance, each server instance is quarantined by an IT administrator one-by-one in turn, maintained, and returned to service in the cluster. However, this can be tedious and time-consuming.